On Wednesday, a number of large websites from around the Internet joined the Internet Society to announce World IPv6 day, a 24-hour test period where all the agreed websites will enable the IPv6 protocol alongside the typical IPv4 for the day to test compatability.
On June 8, 2011, Google:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/world-ipv6-day-firing-up-engines-on-new.html , Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/world-ipv6-day-solving-the-ip-address-chicken-and-egg-challenge/484445583919 , Yahoo! Akami, Limelight and other websites will join Internet Society in making the first major "test flight" to IPv6:
http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2902 With over a billion combined hits between the websites, these websites will be testing their infrastructure to ensure that they can handle the switch. During World IPv6 day, experts predict that only 0.05% of the Internet users will have trouble connecting to these websites due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.
IPv4 uses a 32-bit (four-byte) address, limiting the number of available unique addresses to 4,294,967,296. However, some of these addresses have been reserved for private networks, limiting the available public addresses. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing for approximately 3.4 x 10^38, enough public addresses to last us a lifetime.
Available IPv4 addresses are now in the final 2%, with just 91 million addresses left. These publicly available Internet addresses are expected to completely be gone in the next 32 days.
(NW)